How to render parts of the camera view and merge afterwards?

Question

I watched a video on youtube (I lost it) that shows rendering parts of the screen to combine them in a single image. I followed it to the point where I couldn't adjust the dimensions under the "set render border", but in the video he had dimensions and I have nothing.

I need it for 4K and 8K renders (without anti-aliasing), but my laptop can't handle it all at once and I don't have time for a 4 hour waiting so this feature will work perfectly.

I'm using version 2.76 so is it moved to another place or removed. Maybe a bug?

Answer 1

Using python is probably the best way to split up the image into exact tiles, as mentioned by Campbell Barton:

If you do some operation that requires precision (splitting the render into exact tiles for eg), you would be best to use Python for this anyway

At the moment you can try the Render Border Add-on. Although it's built to (re-)render an exact area of the image in order to save render time. For a single image you can animate 'Center X' and 'Center Y' properties to get the desired tiles:

To get 4 Tiles for instance:

1. Hit 'Reset the Render Border' to get the full frame
2. Divide 'R' and 'T' by 2 to get the first tile
3. Multiply 'Center X' by 3 to get the tile in the lower right corner
4. Then multiply 'Center Y' by 3 to get the upper right tile
5. Finally divide 'Center X' by 3 to get the tile in the upper left corner

Note: Unfortunately you cannot render this as animation, since Blender checks the size of the render border only once per render execution. So you'll need to render single frames and stitch it afterwards (by hand or using image tools such as ImageMagick):

Result

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Also I'd highly recommend Brecht's instructions on how to render large image resolutions: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/16261/3710

Answer 2

I tried many solutions for this and IMO the best working solution for me was this,

Camera Cropper & Splitter : [Update] https://gitlab.com/ChameleonScales/Camera-Cropper-Splitter

You should really give it a try, its just one click and voila, you got a nice animation. Save it as separate images and then stitch it with any image editing software you like.

Step 1: Setup the scene as you require.

Step 2: Go to Render Tab > Camera Cropper & Splitter , select Number of Tiles and Tiling order accordingly

Note : If the required Frame resolution is larger than 3840x2160, choose higher number of tiles.

Step 3: Press Split Button. You`ll see keyframes are added, in the timeline. Adjust "End Frame" till the last keyframe. And start rendering the animation.

Tip: If you don't want hassle, try MS Powerpoint, grouping and saving as image just works fine and saves time.

Answer 3

Lets say you're rendering a 4000x4000 resolution image by using the above mentioned "Render Border" addon. You can animate the border to render each border block of your scene, lets say - 1/16th of the full camera. Then, apply the image sequence you just rendered to a plane and with the camera option "fit camera to plane" fit the camera boundress to the first frame, then, animate it along with image sequence to the last frame Parent the camera to an empty object. And now just animate the camera from the horizontal line of blocks, then duplicate the key frames depending on the vertical rows you have and for the vertical once - if you have 16 rows, then create 16 key-frames for the empty vertically and them scale them up to be in sync with the horizontal rows of the camera.